Leaderboard Zone

AT&T has responded to the recent blogstorm about its TOS, interesting to see that the policies they promulgate came in part from their deal with Yahoo. But it’s good to see the company respond quickly and clearly.

The company has sent me this statement:

AT&T respects its subscribers’ rights to voice their opinions and concerns over any matter they wish. However, we retain the right to disassociate ourselves from websites and messages explicitly advocating violence, or any message that poses a threat to children (e.g. child pornography or exploitation). We do not terminate customer service solely because a customer speaks negatively about AT&T. (my emphasis)

This policy is not new and it’s not unique to AT&T.

As a result of our recent mergers, we have simply incorporated language from the AT&T Yahoo! High Speed Internet Terms of Service into the Terms of Service for our legacy Worldnet and BellSouth customers. The language is consistent with that of previous documents for those companies, and is equally consistent with former AT&T and its legacy companies’ policies.

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Yahoo has launched a new search interface that more deeply integrates its core properties (Local, Sports, Music, etc.) and implements key new features like a new search assist based on concepts, not just query suggestions. I will have a deeper look soon, but my damn home wifi is down, and I can’t post pictures. I’m working off a Verizon card at the moment… Link.

At Web 2 this year we plan to have a bit of fun, not that the conference isn’t fun. But we thought we’d put a number of well known web veterans up on stage after dinner and see how much they know about our industry. This format is familiar to any of you who’ve been to D in the past or have seen early versions of the Computer History Bowl, which has been around in various incarnations for a very long time. The twist is that we’re focusing just on web history, which, until recently, was something of a oxymoron. Now that the web is more than a decade old, however, we figured it was about time we had some fun with it.

We’ll be grilling folks like Martin Nisenholtz, who has been in this industry for as long at the New York Times has had a .com (actually, longer), Steve Case, who started AOL, Jay Adelson, CEO of Digg, and Scott Kurnit, founder of About.com.

But I need your help. We’ve set up a form where you can suggest questions we should ask them. Don’t worry if you don’t know the answer, we’ll figure it out. But if you do, so much the better. Stuff like “What was on the cover of the first Industry Standard” or “How much revenue did The Globe have when it went public?”. If we use your question, I’ll thank you from stage.

It should be a fun time, and we’ll make sure to get it up on the web as soon as we can, so no matter if you can make the conference or not, you can check it out!